


Knight of Amaranth

by trappednightingale



Series: Amaranth [1]
Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-27
Updated: 2013-02-27
Packaged: 2017-12-03 18:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/701567
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/trappednightingale/pseuds/trappednightingale
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The first time Leon dies, he is fighting a dragon.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knight of Amaranth

The first time Leon dies, he is fighting a dragon. As the flames engulf him, his last thought is one of pride, that he died fighting for what he believed in.

Except he didn’t.

He wakes up in the field, surrounded by the dead bodies of his fellow soldiers and his first thought is “Why me?”

But that day he pledges to make himself a better warrior, promises to make sure the gods decision to spare his life was not a decision they would ever regret.

As he slowly rises to his feet, he spots a plant that had been crushed by his body. Upon recognizing the bloom as an amaranth, Leon hesitantly picks one of the crushed red flowers and tucks it into his armor. This token becomes his symbol, and he always ensures to carry a bloom from that day forward.

 

*          *          *

The second time Leon dies, he doesn’t die.

Even as someone carries him away from  the site of battle, he can feel death’s familiar pull. But right as he thinks it’s over, that he’ll never wake again, he feels cold metal pressing against his lips and water trickling into his mouth. He swallows and then finds himself gasping for breath. The druids reassure him, tell him he’ll be fine, but he feels a strange tingling in his fingertips and in his toes and he slowly realizes that this will not be the last time he will be spared from death.

He presses a hand to his chest and feels the soft petals of the amaranth on his skin.

*          *          *

Life goes on for Sir Leon.

He continues to fight, to watch his fellow knights die in battle while he himself always manages to stumble away from it, sometimes as the sole survivor.

He still gets wounded but he finds that no matter what he endures, he cannot and will not die. At first he wonders if it was the cup the druids had him drink out of, but a quick, albeit slightly vague conversation with Gaius reveals that when the cup was destroyed, all immortal beings created by it were destroyed as well.

Some nights he lies awake, fingers caressing the amaranth bloom as he asks the gods why they’ve given him this gift, why he survived when so many other men, better men, are now naught but ashes.

After a few years, he stops asking, stops questioning. He vows to treat life as a gift and to uphold the knight’s pledge of fealty. The vow he made on the day of his knighting, to lay his life down for Camelot and her king until the day when he can no longer draw breath, did not seem like such a steep promise at the time, not when every knight knew his death would be in the name of Camelot. But even now, as Leon realizes that his days might not ever end and that he will most likely outlive the kingdom itself, he cannot bring himself to regret the pledge.

*          *          *

Being one of Arthur’s most trusted knights is a dangerous job, but it is also exhilarating. There’s a feeling Leon gets while fighting alongside Lancelot, Percival, Elyan and Gwaine; a feeling that he would no longer be the sole survivor of any battles, that they would all walk away from each quest battered and bruised, but together.

It was the first time since that first revival that Leon no longer felt alone.

And as he sits in the tavern alongside his fellow knights, and even Merlin, Leon suddenly became overwhelmed. Because in that moment he realized that every death he’d ever had and ever would have, and every subsequent revival, every time he had been overcome with the guilt of a survivor was worth it. Because in the end, it had all led him to this.

As he rises to his feet and offers to buy the next round, the amaranth bloom falls to the floor, forgotten.


End file.
